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South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

arstechnica.com

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Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#131

Post by kakacik »

rfw300 wrote: post #125
cherryteastain wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had a large memory manufacturer, Infineon, who spun out their memory division as Qimonda which then went bankrupt [1]. They were the 2nd largest in the world at one time apparently. Looking back, it's easy to say the German govt should have thrown them a billion or two to keep them afloat. However, state intervention was very unpopular at the time in economic circles, and there was much furor over bailouts follo…

Germany’s austerity policy after 2008 may be one of the largest economic blunders in history. It would be one thing if they merely committed self-harm, but they also used their pull in the EU to drag the rest of the continent down with them. Reminded of Matt Yglesias’s excellent headline from 2010: Angela Merkel Lucky the Bar for “Worst German Leader” is Very High

One thing that I will never understand - how can german population not see through all that socialist bullshit she produced, promises undelivered, how much long term harm she generated across whole Europe (not just EU). Hard push for (now visibly) failed immigration at all costs, nuclear energy rollback (and she was nuclear physicist at least by her studies) and subsequent buying of foreign coal-based electricity, fragmentation of EU.

She literally licked putin's boots well into Ukraine war and still thinks licking his ass is the correct course to solve war in Ukraine (which started 2014 and it was pretty nasty already back then, the world just didn't care also thanks to her).

She is by far the biggest catastrophe modern Europe encountered after Hitler. She helped remove any proper fighting chance for the top dog Europe had for 21st century. She singlehandedly caused proper hate against EU in large parts of (not only) eastern EU population, and hence the rise of populist left or right wing politicians whose whole success story was just point at her failings and criticize, enough to get 20-30% of the votes and even win elections, repeatedly. She literally made people like Orban or Fico.

She still admits no mistakes, even wants to become german president. How effin' out of touch with reality she is.

Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#132

Post by hobofan »

timerol wrote: post #56
GuB-42 wrote: post #17

The title sounds to me like: I am going to spend $1000 in groceries and dance lessons. That is, two very different things lumped together. Memory chips are like groceries, essential commodity parts, a no-nonsense investment. Humanoid robots are like dance lessons, it is cool, it is sexy, and it may pay off in the future, but the value is much less certain.

$585B on new fabs, $357B on AI data centers, and $5.8B on humanoid robots. One of those numbers is not like the others

I don't have the historic numbers at hand, but I would assume that for each of those categories this is a similar proportional increase, so it's similarly notable to mention the increase in spending on humanoid robots.

Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#133

Post by formerly_proven »

red75prime wrote: post #130
xvilka wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real neurons are orders of magnitude more complex than their artificial pseudo-approximation (it is all based on the century-old understanding of how neurons work). You can think of _individual_ biological neuron as an analog of the small artificial neural network. You can see this simple visual explanation on YouTube[1]. So we aren't even close. It doesn't mean the AI is impossible, it just means people underestimat…

But for biological neurons to do something that can't be efficiently approximated on a digital computer (but conductive to useful information processing) they need to have unknown unknowns (well, partial unknowns like an unknown quantum algorithm will do too). We don't know the violations of the physical Church-Turing thesis that are conductive for machine learning. We don't have evidence for their existence in the b…

You're talking about a philosophical debate whether the brain is computable, the other commenters are pointing out that even conservative estimates point to a brain-like NN requiring over a quadrillion parameters.

Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#134

Post by red75prime »

formerly_proven wrote: post #133
red75prime wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But for biological neurons to do something that can't be efficiently approximated on a digital computer (but conductive to useful information processing) they need to have unknown unknowns (well, partial unknowns like an unknown quantum algorithm will do too). We don't know the violations of the physical Church-Turing thesis that are conductive for machine learning. We don't have evidence for their existence in the b…

You're talking about a philosophical debate whether the brain is computable, the other commenters are pointing out that even conservative estimates point to a brain-like NN requiring over a quadrillion parameters.

...assuming that modelling the physical structure of the brain is the only way to model its functions.

Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#135

Post by jampekka »

xvilka wrote: post #119
red75prime wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there's no unknown unknowns in the brain, it's most likely possible. As the universal approximation theorem and empirical results of scaling SGD+RL suggest. Whether it will be economically viable remains to be seen. The human cerebellum has a peculiar structure and 80% of the brain's neurons after all.

Real neurons are orders of magnitude more complex than their artificial pseudo-approximation (it is all based on the century-old understanding of how neurons work). You can think of _individual_ biological neuron as an analog of the small artificial neural network. You can see this simple visual explanation on YouTube[1]. So we aren't even close. It doesn't mean the AI is impossible, it just means people underestimat…

Brain's information flow also isn't just through direct neuron-to-neuron connections. Firing also releases neuromodulators into the extracellular space which affects how other neurons operate. Furhermore neuron connection architecture is very different between brain and feedforward ANNs, with the former exhibiting a lot of recurrent connections.

Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#136

Post by dgellow »

DennisP wrote: post #52
yalogin wrote: post #25

Why is the whole world jumping on to humanoid robots? What am I not seeing that requires this level of investment in it?

For the optimistic case, read this piece by RethinkX: https://www.rethinkx.com/blog/rethinkx/the-disruption-of-lab... (Fwiw, >20 years ago RethinkX correctly projected the exponential cost declines of solar and batteries, when everybody else was drawing straight lines.)

> RethinkX correctly projected the exponential cost declines of solar and batteries, when everybody else was drawing straight lines

That’s not at all what I remember, what are you basing that claim on?

Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#137

Post by formerly_proven »

red75prime wrote: post #134
formerly_proven wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're talking about a philosophical debate whether the brain is computable, the other commenters are pointing out that even conservative estimates point to a brain-like NN requiring over a quadrillion parameters.

...assuming that modelling the physical structure of the brain is the only way to model its functions.

Building a "NN with similar capability as the brain" is not modelling its physical structure. The assumption is not made.

Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#138

Post by red75prime »

jampekka wrote: post #135
xvilka wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real neurons are orders of magnitude more complex than their artificial pseudo-approximation (it is all based on the century-old understanding of how neurons work). You can think of _individual_ biological neuron as an analog of the small artificial neural network. You can see this simple visual explanation on YouTube[1]. So we aren't even close. It doesn't mean the AI is impossible, it just means people underestimat…

Brain's information flow also isn't just through direct neuron-to-neuron connections. Firing also releases neuromodulators into the extracellular space which affects how other neurons operate. Furhermore neuron connection architecture is very different between brain and feedforward ANNs, with the former exhibiting a lot of recurrent connections.

Deep learning doesn't try to mimic all the intricacies of biological processes. It tries to approximate the end result (information processing).

Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#139

Post by b112 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #118
b112 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same logic for why self-driving cars can't be cloud based, applies for robots. Something cannot be in the middle of a delicate operation and then "oops!", no network, it just stops. The larger the context window, the better with models. Having a few TB of RAM would be exceptionally helpful. All this just made me realise something however. Having your robot dormant and charging, is a bit of a waste. You could have…

> The same logic for why self-driving cars can't be cloud based, applies for robots. Something cannot be in the middle of a delicate operation and then "oops!", no network, it just stops. I don't think you understood my post. The equivalent of self-driving is the movement control I was talking about. Self-driving cars don't have high level logic, except for route planning. Which often is offloaded to the cloud. An ex…

You're missing the point. The issue is "how is the thing used" not trying to make identical break points in differing tech. A self driving car cannot have object detection, collision avoidance, human detection offloaded to the cloud. Ever. At all. A network drop can't mean it smashes into things. Or stops unsafely.

The same is true with an android. Imagine it turning on an frying pan, cooking dinner, and then going offline part way through. Or turning on a tap to wash something, and going offline while the sink overflows and destroys the house.

There are myriad of such scenarios, but local compute is absolutely, 100% necessary. Anyone betting the farm on putting network controlled devices into homes for any serious task is going to lose their shirt. Local compute is an absolute requirement, and a few TB of RAM and local compute will be nothing over the scope of this discussion (a few years minimum, just to build and kick off all these new fabs).

By the time these fabs are online, expect most smart phones to have 1TB of RAM and significant llm capable compute (gpu or other custom silicon). I would be astonished if flagship model phones in 2030 weren't sold with 1TB RAM. Note I'm saying flagship, there will be of course economy models as always. Certainly laptops will be sold in multi-TB RAM configs.

Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#140

Post by darkwater »

dyauspitr wrote: post #112
gavinsyancey wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Autonomous (non-teleoperated) humanoid robots that can do useful work in an unfamiliar environment do not exist. And nobody's close enough to making them to understand if they're possible with our current level of technology, let alone how.

We said the same thing about Waymo, that it was perpetually in the future. It took them less than a decade. The robots today are functionally capable, they don’t have the right fuzzy intelligence yet. It’s purely a data problem (lack of) and a lot of people are working on it.

Are you saying autonomous driving is a solved problem, even at scale? I haven't seen any Waymo in my small town in Southern Europe yet.
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